Bird and Sherwin's American Prometheus

I read with great pleasure this biography of Robert Oppenheimer. It captures the man very well, but it also makes me wonder about him. It appears to be the tragic story of a man of great privilege, born to wealth and gifted with brilliance, going from triumph to triumph in heading the successful effort to build the atomic weapon for the US during World War II, and then going to head the Institute for Advanced Research at Princeton. The man, however, was unable to cope with any problems and when he was ensnared by McCarthyism he was destroyed in his soul. Here's to the school of hard knocks toughening you up early. I found the man's life interesting, but a cautionary tale also for the incapacity of the academic to deal with real life or see big things coming. I understand with his reluctance to see the bomb used, but he worked during World War II, what did he think would happen? He married a woman who was the widow of a communist hero killed in the Spanish Civil War -- why should he have contested the withdrawal of his security clearance in that atmosphere? How could he say damaging things about his own former students? Naive is too kind a word for this, but from the vantage point of years, it is merely very sad.